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I need to format external hard disks to EXT3 MBR with the iNode size set to 128 bits. This is for a very specific use, i.e. the delivery of DCP to digital cinema servers.

I'd like to be able to do that in Ubuntu.

The challenge is that I am a total Ubuntu newbie (usually a Mac OSX user) so I'm looking for a simple solution, involving as little coding as possible (at the moment, I wouldn't even know where to enter a command line...)

So far, I have downloaded Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.1, burned it to DVD, and successfully booted my Mac Pro in Ubuntu... Wow! I can see my HFS+ internal and external drives, everything seems to be working, except for wifi (which doesn't concern me for the moment).

When I tried to use the included "Disk" application to format the drive, I could not find any mention of iNodes anywhere.

Is there a tool that would allow me to do this formatting easily?

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  • You should edit the answer to be more to the point, with less distractions. Aug 4, 2014 at 0:24
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    Note for ext4 users: Don't change ext4 inode size to 128, or you will lose feature (small performance reduction some case), see Birth is empty on ext4 Mar 28, 2015 at 6:45
  • I fail to understand why small inodes would be necessary for digital movies .. normally small inodes would mean small files. It seems contradictory.
    – JB.
    Oct 13, 2017 at 9:53

1 Answer 1

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I assume you want to create an ext3 filesystem (why "MBR").
You probably want an inode size of 128 bytes, not bits, right? The default inode size is 256 bytes.

The command to create filesystems, mke2fs, has an option to specify the inode size.

Use something like this to create a filesystem:

mke2fs -t ext3 -I 128 /dev/sdXX

From man mke2fs:

    -I inode-size
           Specify  the size of each inode in bytes.  The inode-size value must be a power of 2 larger or equal to
           128.  The larger the inode-size the more space the inode table  will  consume,  and  this  reduces  the
           usable  space  in  the  filesystem  and  can also negatively impact performance.  It is not possible to
           change this value after the filesystem is created.

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